What’s That Smell?
IN THE FALL OF 2005, NEW YORK CITY SMELLED LIKE MAPLE SYRUP, and many New Yorkers panicked. The city often stinks, but this pleasant odor was unusual and people could smell it everywhere. Certain that something was wrong, residents called the city’s 311 nonemergency hot-line, spoke with the press, and blogged about their concerns. In a post-9/11 world replete with chemical toxins, many suspected bioterrorism and feared for their health. Some individuals, unaware that everyone could smell a strong, sweet fragrance, thought they were having a stroke or “some sort of brain tumor–induced olfactory hallucination.” Others joked about the smell, chalking it up to “EGGO-terrorism” or a Vermont tourism campaign. Through both fear and humor, New Yorkers tried to understand what this odd odor was, where it originated, and how it affected those living in the city.1
New Yorkers’ varying reactions to the maple syrup smell reflect twenty-first-century beliefs about the relationship between environment and health, in which human bodies are registers for environmental toxins that often elude detection by scientific instruments. We live in an odorous world, but most scents are familiar and go largely unnoticed, while unusual odors or strong stenches demand attention. “What’s that smell?” can be a casual inquiry about a new perfume or a fraught question for identifying a potentially noxious odor. For the New Yorkers alarmed by the maple syrup fragrance, their sense of smell functioned as a way of knowing and evaluating the environment. You will learn the source of the maple syrup smell in a few pages, but it took years for New Yorkers to find its origin. Every time the odor wafted into Manhattan, New Yorkers smelled the change in the air and wondered if it was harming them. Olfaction also performed this function in nineteenth-century New York, though odors then raised a different set of health concerns. Whereas modern Americans worry that nefarious actors will introduce chemical or biological agents into urban environments to wreak havoc among dense populations, nineteenth-century Americans feared miasma, literally the bad air that caused illness, when they detected unusually strong or foul odors. Miasmas were not the work of foreign enemies, but the creation of local environments, and thus prompted environmental concerns.
In the summer of 1863, thousands of Chicagoans signed a petition proclaiming that the southwesterly wind filled “the atmosphere … with this foul poisonous stench … rendering it quite unsafe, and greatly detrimental to the health to attempt to breath[e] it.” Chicago’s economy was booming during the Civil War, but distillers, meatpackers, glue factories, fat renderers, tanners, fertilizer manufacturers, and soap factories produced foul odors as well as jobs and money. The editors of the Chicago Tribune lambasted the owners of these new businesses as “offenders against humanity and manufacturers of disease” because they produced a stench that “each day … was greater and more extensive.” As one Chicagoan summarized the danger, “The oder [sic] is enough to create a typhus fever.”2
In the certainty of their assertions, nineteenth-century Chicagoans possessed a stronger and more nuanced knowledge of their changing urban environs than modern New Yorkers and their many questions about the unusual smell of maple syrup. In both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, odor complaints appeared in the press and citizens appealed to city governments for relief, but Chicagoans never asked what the “foul poisonous stench” was, where it had originated, or what effect it would have on their bodies. Instead, Chicagoans confidently declared that the odorous stew came from new and expanded industries located along the Chicago River and pronounced that inhaling these stenches harmed health and caused disease. No contrarian voices emerged to mock these health concerns. Rather, Chicago’s leaders tried to control foul smells while promoting industrial growth and ultimately resolved the issue through a tremendous feat of environmental engineering: they reversed the course of the Chicago River so that it flows away from, rather than into, Lake Michigan.
Chicagoans take great pride in their reverse-engineered river, a symbol of nineteenth-century human’s conquest over nature, and many historians have explained how changing nature protected Chicago’s drinking water and public health. By diverting city wastes away from Lake Michigan, Chicago’s water source, the engineers effectively stopped the spread of cholera and typhus through excrement-contaminated waters. But when aldermen approved the expensive and ambitious plan of the Board of Public Works, neither they nor the engineers understood how polluted water spreads disease. Instead, they thought that diverting the city’s waste-filled river away from downtown would improve the taste of their drinking water and, more importantly, redirect that pestilential stench away from the city. In their minds, protecting health meant improving the smell of the city. The lengths that Chicagoans went to raise the question of how encounters with odors shaped urban development and ideas about American cities.3
The idea that a smell could cause illness seems laughable today, because germ theory is so entrenched in contemporary culture. While unusual smells might signal the presence of something dangerous, the odors themselves are harmless. But before germ theory explained that microscopic germs, microbes, bacteria, and viruses cause illnesses, miasma theory rationalized ill health ranging from headaches, nausea, diarrhea, and slight fevers to deadly outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and typhus as the result of inhaling bad air. Air, according to Noah Webster’s American Dictionary in 1832, was “inodorous, invisible, insipid, colorless, elastic, possessed of gravity, easily moved, rarefied and condensed.” Because a lack of odor was air’s primary quality, smells were a strong indication that this vital gas was compromised. Foul odors portended the presence of miasma, the disease-causing effluvia released by rotting corpses and swampy environs. The relation between stench, miasma, and disease was best expressed by the British sanitarian Edwin Chadwick in 1846 when he said, “All smell is disease,” a shorthand that made perfect sense to nineteenth-century Americans.4
Smell Detectives asks what it was like to live in American cities during the nineteenth century, when everyone believed that foul odors caused disease, but urban and industrial growth created new and stronger stinks. In their attention to social rather than environmental issues, historians have missed this paradox of urban growth, but nineteenth-century Americans certainly did not. Those who moved into cities or experienced rapidly changing environs in the nineteenth century regularly judged the environment through their noses and found cities wanting. Yet relatively few abandoned cities. Recognizing the importance of both healthy economies and a healthy populace, urban residents from all backgrounds strove to create cities that were simultaneously sweet smelling and industrial.
Americans shared an early and widespread environmental consciousness directed at remaking the city into a healthier landscape. This consciousness was distinctly urban in its embrace of cities and industries. Though they never converged into a reform movement and rarely recognized their common struggle, health reformers, housekeepers, chemists, businessmen, tenement dwellers, and city aldermen shared common sense, practices, and goals. The different actions taken by each of these groups and countless individuals created conflicts and changed over time but ultimately shaped cities to conform to their ideals of healthful environments. The history of smell is critical to understanding this environmental consciousness and recognizing its many tangible and lasting effects on cities.
TAKING SMELL SERIOUSLY
In an 1875 article about the daily worsening smells of the city, the New York Times wrote, “Here is a nursery of pestilence constructing right under our eyes and noses, with all the natural incentives to fever.” Nineteenth-century Americans wrote about stenches as nauseating, intolerable, pestilential, noxious, suffocating, disgusting, and deadly. They petitioned city aldermen and state legislatures for stench abatement and took business owners, those “offenders against humanity and manufacturers of disease,” to court over malodorous production. They wrote poetry about the “stinking drains” and “swamps of death” that poisoned people in their homes. They created boards of health to control urban odors, and when the city still smelled, they indicted health board members for “failure to abate a nuisance,” a misdemeanor offense. They quoted Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had poetically counted “two and seventy stenches, / all well defined, and many stinks!” in Cologne and mused that their city, whether it was New York or Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago or New Orleans, smelled worse.5
Nineteenth-century Americans took odors seriously, and that in turn requires seriousness from us. When miasma theory was common sense, olfaction was central to the evaluation of air quality. Like the other senses, olfaction is a product of both the body and the mind. Biologists, chemists, and psychologists explain that olfaction occurs when odorant molecules bind with olfactory receptors in the nose and send signals to the brain, where the olfactory bulb interprets and reacts to the odors. Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of the senses argue that the senses and their functions are neither innate nor biologically determined but have varied widely over time and space. As a result, the act of smelling is biological, but the interpretation of and reaction to odors is socially shaped and the product of one’s cultural context.6
The questions and methods of sensory history have much to offer environmental historians. Sensory history asks how people have perceived their world through their bodies, what role sensory perceptions play in interacting with the world, and how perceptions have varied across time and space. Sensory history argues that scholars need to consider all the senses, moving beyond the enduring visual record to think carefully about how the momentary experiences of hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling also shaped worldviews. This approach assumes that the senses are not solely biological but have changed over time in response to and in concert with societies and, I argue, environments. Sensory history, then, is not a mere catalog of how places looked, sounded, and smelled at different times but also an investigation into how the people who experienced those times and places understood the sights, sounds, and smells.7
That said, the history of smell is particularly difficult to research, not only because odors are ephemeral, but also because smell is the “mute sense,” meaning that there are few words to describe odors. I can conjure the discordant honking and shouting of angry drivers or the postrain twinkling greenery of my lawn with words: you likely have those sounds and sights in your mind right now. Your mental imagery differs from what I hear and see, of course, but the words have conveyed a clear sense to you because they are specific: discordant, honk, shout, twinkle, and green have meanings on their own. In contrast to the rich vocabulary for sights, sounds, textures, and tastes, our olfactory vocabulary is truncated, so I—and most others untrained in perfumery—can only describe an odor by what it smells like: a skunk, a rose, maple syrup. Those descriptions work if you have smelled skunks, roses, or maple syrup before; those who have not smelled these have no frame of reference and only know that I am writing about an odor.8
It is no accident that olfactory words are so few; our vocabulary has resulted from cultural taboos against talking about smells, especially the nasty ones. Sociologists and anthropologists have argued that taboos are social creations for creating and policing order and, as such, exert incredible power in society. As Norbert Elias claimed in his 1938 The Civilizing Process and subsequent scholars have explored, social shame and disgust around odors rose with the development of manners and middle-class refinement in European societies. Over time, manners increasingly prohibited discussing smell in polite conversations. Historical studies of smell have argued that odors and olfaction played a more important cultural role in Western societies before the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason celebrated sight as reliable and denigrated olfaction as a lower and animalistic sense.9
As a result of olfaction’s dual muteness, silenced by a lack of vocabulary and by cultural prohibitions against discussing smells, odors are difficult to find in the written historical record. Smell Detectives begins with the premise that moments when people felt obligated to translate their olfactory experience into words deserve careful attention. More often than not, when people registered a concern about smells, as when New Yorkers called 311 about the maple syrup or Chicagoans signed the petition about the southwesterly wind, they did so because the odors were unusual and therefore significant. The few smell incidents that are notorious in modern history—the Great Stink of London in 1858 and the Great Stink of Paris in 1880, both events when stenches of excrement overwhelmed the city, created a health panic, and drove people to flee—became “great” because the odors themselves and the outrage against them were anything but ordinary.10
Environmental historians have not only something to gain by asking the questions of sensory history but also much to offer. As the study of perceptions, sensory history often neglects the material conditions being perceived. Yet miasma theory was not the sole contributor to nineteenth-century olfaction; flowering plants, decomposing bodies, fruit stands, rotting garbage, waterways full of offal and sewage, new chemical industries, and industrialized slaughter produced some of the odors that urban dwellers inhaled, judged, and reacted against. By considering environments in all their variety and richness alongside olfactory perceptions, and noting changes in each, historians can better understand the development of both urban environments and ideas about cities. Creating and living in cities was an iterative process that incorporated voices and experiences beyond those of traditional authorities such as mayors, aldermen, civil engineers, and urban planners.11
Furthermore, environmental historians’ close attention to the particularities of place, geography, ecology, geology, and climate brings an important corrective to sensory history. These methods of environmental history challenge sweeping arguments. Many pioneering works on the history of smell began from the notion that we live in a deodorized world, where both odors and the sense of smell are repressed, and made grand claims about modernity as a forward march of odor removal and olfactory desensitization. The assumption of a deodorized and desensitized present led historians to neglect the material effects of significant environmental and social changes in the modern period. The proliferation of chemical industries, the squalor produced by rapid urbanization, and the rise of gardening and perfumery are modern developments that produce numerous odors. Attention to the specific features of environs—including the multiple effects of introducing new people and processes into environments, and the interactions between the built, natural, political, social, and cultural environments—yields richer explanations for why certain senses mattered more than others in particular moments and documents how varied sensory experience is across space.12
Smell Detectives approaches olfaction as a form of tacit knowledge, an expertise gained through lived experience rather than formal training, whereby people know and evaluate their environment but lack the concepts and vocabulary to articulate how they know what they know. When asked to explain how they could distinguish between odors, or called to testify about the health effects of a stench in the nineteenth century, individuals referred to their own experience as expertise, as did the physicians who investigated sanitary conditions and the chemists who analyzed water and air. The equation of olfactory experience with environmental knowledge did not become problematic until newly created health officials claimed authority over odors, their sources, and their control after the Civil War. If historians consider scientists and men of science in the same way that their contemporaries did—as members of society rather than authorities over it—we can tell richer stories about the interactions between “lay” and “scientific” knowledge, better understand the imperatives for and difficulties of professionalization, and recognize why olfactory knowledge was dismissed or downplayed in specific times and contexts. Stories such as those told here will help historians and society to recognize both the importance of scientific knowledge and the value of other ways of knowing.13
SMELLING COMMITTEES: SCIENCE, AUTHORITY, POWER, AND EXPERTISE
In response to the many petitions they received about the stench in the early 1860s, Chicago’s aldermen hired chemist Frederick Mahla to conduct a “scientific chemical analysis” of river water in order to determine what caused the odors. Week after week, Mahla traveled up and down the Chicago River with an assortment of vials, jars, and acids, tools that he used to conduct field tests and collect samples for analysis. On his tenth and final foray in August, Mahla accompanied city aldermen, engineers, and newspaper reporters, each of whom carried his own tools for the encounter with stench: bottles of cologne, camphor, chloride of lime, lemons, cigars, and handkerchiefs. Together, these men and their tools constituted a “smelling committee” that sought to find and control the sources of the “pestilential stench.”14
On this committee, Mahla and his scientific devices were no more important than the politicians and engineers who carried fragrant instruments. Before they received Mahla’s scientific report, city aldermen passed new ordinances and, following the advice of public works engineers, decided that the best way to control odors was the mechanical solution of reverse engineering the Chicago River. The constitution of the smelling committee around the chemist and ultimate dismissal of chemical findings illustrate some important realities about nineteenth-century urban life: science played a significant role in cities and people often turned to scientists for answers, but science was not automatically an authority and scientists often lacked power.
Smell Detectives approaches chemists and chemistry, physicians and medicine through the words of other urban dwellers as well as their own so that we can see the role that these practitioners and their knowledge played in society and chart how and why those roles changed over time. Science was vital in nineteenth-century urban life, but it did not trump other ways of knowing, nor was it solely the possession of trained scientists such as Frederick Mahla. The importance of science within rather than over society is evident in the items the committee members carried. At first blush, it seems obvious that Mahla possessed tools for scientific inquiry and diagnosis, whereas everyone else employed agents to cope with or find relief from the stench. However, the chloride of lime and camphor brought by the politicians and reporters would easily have found a place in the chemist’s arsenal; the use of these chemicals by non-chemists indicates that there were many ways in which laypersons interacted with, understood, and drew upon chemistry in their daily lives. This is also a powerful reminder that objects have a purpose. By considering material culture as well as the documentary record, historians can better apprehend how people understood and interacted with their world.
I contend that we need to understand expertise, authority, and power as relational. Questions of expertise, authority, and power are vexed, and who is able to claim expertise, establish authority, or wield power varies greatly depending on context. When Chicago’s aldermen hired Mahla as a chemist, they both recognized his expertise and limited his power. Mahla possessed scientific expertise as a result of his education and practice. He exercised authority in his laboratory, in his college classroom, and in the courtroom when called to testify on toxicology. However, as an outsider to city government, Mahla lacked political power over the city and his position of authority was short-lived, ending when he submitted his report. Likewise, nineteenth-century culture recognized women as authorities over domestic space. Women possessed specialized knowledge or expertise gained through their experiences and the education they received from their mothers and from domestic advice. Yet, because nineteenth-century women lacked political power, female authors such as Catharine E. Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe carefully built upon their cultural authority over the home to engage in public and political conversations about health. Despite their different positions in society, chemists and women both had expertise or specialized knowledge but could only claim authority and exert power in specific contexts.15
In nineteenth-century cities, scientific authority and political authority were often at odds. This reality frustrated the physicians and scientists who understood urban environments and industries in different terms than the politicians who had the power to decide policies, pass laws, and appoint officials. This frustration was one of many impetuses to campaigns for scientific positions within urban governments, which began before the Civil War, and the postwar organization of professional associations. Professionalization, the separation of trained practitioners from amateurs, was a concerted effort by scientists to obtain political power that would, in turn, make it difficult for politicians or citizens to dismiss science as an authority.16
SMELL DETECTIVES
On February 5, 2009, three and a half years after New Yorkers first inhaled the mysterious maple syrup smell, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called a last-minute press conference. Reporters assembled to hear Bloomberg celebrate the work of “OEM [Office of Emergency Management] and DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] smelling sleuths” who had tracked the maple syrup smell to its source. The “smelling sleuths” had cross-referenced the location of citizens who complained about the odor with atmospheric conditions of temperature, humidity, wind trajectory, and velocity. They put all this data on a smell map that showed how the mysterious maple syrup smell wafted into New York from Frutarom, a flavor and fragrance factory located in New Jersey. Smell incidents corresponded with the dates when Frutarom had processed fenugreek, an herb common in Asian cooking but better known to Americans as the flavoring in artificial maple syrup.17
When Bloomberg talked about city employees as “smelling sleuths,” he unconsciously echoed Charles Frederick Chandler, the Columbia University chemist who served as president of New York City’s Board of Health from 1873 until 1883. Chandler coined the phrase smell detectives in 1878 to describe anyone who followed her nose. Like the twenty-first-century smelling sleuths, nineteenth-century smell detectives tried to follow odors to their sources, but the results were mixed; Chandler asserted that “citizens are very poor smell detectives,” because they rarely followed smells to distant origins and instead thought that all odors emanated from local sources. Chandler urged the use of properly trained chemists in place of these poor smell detectives, and he was ultimately successful in claiming odor identification and evaluation as the exclusive domain of officials.18 When Bloomberg celebrated smelling sleuths, he trumpeted only city officials, overlooking the hundreds of everyday noses that had detected an unusual odor and called 311 to register a concern.
Who could be a smell detective changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as the sciences and medicine professionalized. Education, professional associations, and specialized language distinguished trained, expert practitioners from uneducated amateurs or the lay public. But the sense of smell was universal, which means that anyone could—and can—detect odors. Early public health reformers used the universality of smelling to their advantage, arguing that everyone knew cities were unhealthy because everyone smelled the foul air. As reformers achieved their goals of government positions and power over the urban environment, the universality of olfaction changed from an asset to a problem. Citizen smell detectives complained to new health officials about stenches in their neighborhoods and then complained about the same health officials when those odors did not change. Agitated citizens, fearing ill health from the air they breathed, took men like Chandler to court, where he invoked scientific authority and political power to tell them that they did not know what they smelled. But Chandler could not stop New Yorkers from smelling and worrying about the air, any more than today’s health officials and environmental experts can claim exclusive authority over olfaction.
Chicago was not the only American city to grapple with stenches in the nineteenth century. New York’s leaders also chartered a “smelling committee” to trace odors to their sources. The residents of Charleston, Boston, and Philadelphia filed petitions seeking relief from stenches. Physicians in New Orleans, Providence, and Washington, DC, traced outbreaks of disease to the foul smells that emanated from faulty plumbing, new sewer systems, marshy land disrupted by building projects, and canals filled with industrial wastes. In 1869, Charles H. Brigham surveyed the profusion of human-created stinks and summarized the fears of many Americans when he asked, “What Shall We Breathe?” Brigham, a founding member of Michigan’s Board of Health, prophesied a dismal yet not so distant future when the air’s “quality will be destroyed and its benefits lost … by many circumstances and contrivances for which men are responsible.”19
Brigham was asking if modern, industrial cities could be healthy environments, a question that resonates today when we consider the fragility of urban life in the face of air pollutants, compromised water supplies, rusting bridges, rising sea levels, earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires. As blockbuster films and the nightly news remind us, cities are vulnerable environments and urban life is tenuous. But when Brigham worried about American cities, his sole concern was the loss of fresh air to stenches. Brigham was reacting to the rapid urban growth and industrial development of the nineteenth century, when established American cities swelled and new cities sprang up in the trans–Appalachian West. The urban populace ballooned from 322,000 in 1800, to 1.8 million by 1840, and then to just under 10 million in 1870. By 1900, over 30 million Americans, or 40 percent of the total population, called urban areas home. Waves of new residents overwhelmed existing housing stock, transforming homes into overcrowded tenements and cellars into musty apartments. The same industries that attracted migration with promises of jobs and prosperity spewed stenches and smoke into the atmosphere. Not sure if fresh air, “the regenerating power of the human machine” and its perfect chemical balance of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, could endure these onslaughts much longer, Brigham genuinely feared what future generations would breathe.20
To understand the urgency of Brigham’s fears, modern readers need more than the knowledge of rapid urban growth and industrial development. We also must suspend our modern knowledge of disease causation. To look back across a paradigm shift as significant and profound as germ theory is nearly impossible, because the knowledge that germs, microbes, bacteria, viruses, and carcinogens cause ill health is common sense today. But this was not the common sense of nineteenth-century Americans. In the 1800s, scientists and physicians, politicians and reformers, housewives and day laborers shared common sense as well as environmental knowledge that foul odors directly harmed health and caused illness.
The belief in miasma did not make nineteenth-century Americans ignorant or foolish but guided them to do things differently than we might today. When health threats had a material manifestation in odors, so too did the protections against them. The regular practices of nineteenth-century life, from whitewashing a kitchen to smoking a cigar to wearing a nosegay, were so routine that we forget they served a purpose. Each of these activities, and many others, occurred for an olfactory reason that corrected local environmental defects and protected health.
When we recognize that miasma theory was the accepted knowledge of what harmed health, we see serious concerns about odors and air nearly everywhere: not just in overt discussions of health but also in nuisance complaints, domestic advice, scientific research, newspaper editorials, urban guides, letters, diaries, fiction, and satire. In all these venues, comments about fresh air and foul smells were simultaneously discussions of environment, health, material progress, and the perils of urban life. The environmental consciousness behind these various comments gives coherence to stories too often told independently of one another, such as public health reform and housekeeping, or life in Civil War camps and in tenement houses, or the creation of parks and of environmental regulations. Though these stories have been divided among history’s subfields, they occurred coincidentally and interrelated with one another. Olfactory history of urban America brings together the histories of science and medicine, cultural history, women’s history, and environmental history.
Thinking about air requires considering the insides of homes as well as a city’s streets, waterways, and parks. Too often our histories stop at the threshold, caught up in the political intrigues of the day and the conflicts on the streets. Yet, as generations of women’s historians have argued, private homes were not isolated from politics and public life but were the spaces in which many of the nation’s biggest problems were keenly debated and intimately felt. This is especially true when we consider the environment, as the atmosphere and its odors respected no boundaries. Far from being immune to the environmental and health problems of the city, homes were the places to which the sick returned and physicians visited, where convalescents lingered, and where most nineteenth-century Americans drew their last breaths. By considering domestic environments alongside and as part of the wider urban environment, I contend that women’s knowledge and domestic practices shaped urban life alongside the knowledge and actions of physicians, scientists, politicians, and engineers.
Smell Detectives strives to return odors and conversations about them to their place in nineteenth-century American cities. Smells were not the only thing, and often not the primary thing, that urban residents thought, talked, and worried about, but they were part of this period in important ways. The ever-present consciousness of environment and health is evident in the constant interactions with and evaluations of the air, the building of parks as urban lungs, suburbanization in search of fresh air, and the development of scientific expertise, medical authority, and urban governance to control odors. Although odors never became a pressing political question in a century marked by abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, they were a continuous concern that shaped the lives of Americans and the physical, governmental, and social development of American cities.
Furthermore, while modern etiologies teach us that nineteenth-century Americans were mistaken when they equated foul odors with ill health, their odor complaints accurately identified environmental degradation. Many of the places where nineteenth-century Americans held their noses have become industrial zones, environmental hazards, and Superfund sites in the twenty-first century. By taking smell concerns and olfactory aggravation seriously as expressions of tacit knowledge, we not only can recover how nineteenth-century Americans understood and reacted to ongoing environmental degradation but also be better attentive to changes in our contemporary world. While New York City’s maple syrup smell was nonthreatening, the licorice odor you will read about in this book’s conclusion led to the discovery of a chemical spill that streamed into Charleston, West Virginia’s water supply and made every home in the state capital hazardous to health.
Fluctuations in environmental odors provide information about ongoing ecological damage, but only if individuals and governments respond to olfactory knowledge. This raises the question of why individuals and governments react in the ways they do. The answer can be found in the history of nineteenth-century cities, when unusual odors were just as alarming as Rachel Carson’s infamous silent spring.
DETECTING THE SMELLS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES
There is no one story of city smells in the nineteenth century. Instead, there are many stories that open windows onto what it was like to live in the rapidly changing societies and environs of America’s cities. By examining actors in cities scattered throughout the United States, Smell Detectives argues that the myriad ways in which citizens reacted to urban smells profoundly and continually reshaped urban lives, landscapes, and governance throughout the nineteenth century. For every story you will read here, there are many others waiting to be written.
The first three chapters consider three different groups of smell detectives in antebellum America, defined by their use of the common sense that foul odors caused disease. The first chapter follows physicians as they encountered their cities, diagnosed health threats in the urban environment, and called upon olfaction as a universal sense to build a political reform campaign. In chapter 2, we move through the city alongside the individuals who lived there, sought immediate relief from the stenches that they thought caused illness, and developed a range of everyday practices for navigating the city smellscape. Chapter 3 crosses thresholds so we can witness women contending with the foul odors that entered and concentrated in homes, where these women developed and adjusted their domestic regimens to purify and protect the air their families breathed. Though all three groups thought about and interacted with the air of antebellum cities, they rarely intersected with each other and never worked together. Instead, each group worked independently, evaluating and trying to improve the urban environment in the best way possible.
It was the Civil War, rather than any of these individual activities within cities, that changed urban governance and promoted physicians and scientists to positions of political power. Chapter 4 tours the places disrupted by the Civil War, where soldiers, physicians, and nurses inhaled the powerful stenches they associated with cities. Experiences of war-torn environments, and the widespread disease and death that accompanied them, reinforced the common sense that bad smells were dangerous and convinced all Americans that governments needed to take active responsibility for environmental conditions. Cities also changed as a result of the war, as its accompanying industrial growth amplified and intensified urban stenches. In 1866, New York State chartered the Metropolitan Board of Health for New York City, creating the first standing board staffed by physicians who had the power to create and enforce preventive health measures, and other cities followed suit. Chapter 5 asks how significantly health boards changed stenches in cities by comparing the olfactory crisis that sent Frederick Mahla and the smelling committee up the Chicago River in 1862 to the one that put New York City’s Charles Frederick Chandler on the defensive in 1878.
Public health bureaucracies could not, or did not, eliminate foul odors from cities. Residents continued to adapt, both to the physical environment and to the changed political landscape. The sixth chapter returns to the home, where women continued their antebellum practices and implemented new knowledge gained during the Civil War. Domestic advice and practices indicate that both physicians in public and women in their homes were leaning toward germ theory before its introduction or widespread acceptance in the 1870s and 1880s. Charles H. Brigham worried about what Americans would breathe in 1869; four years later, the residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts, awoke to find their houses blackened by a stench so strong it had become visible, and they challenged industries before the state Board of Health. Chapter 7 enters the new courtrooms created by health boards, where olfactory experience was losing ground to more readily reproducible chemical and visual evidence. Through their experience with local and state health boards, citizens learned to emphasize the visual aspects of environmental degradation, contributing to the shift from stench to smoke as the marker of air pollution.
Finally, chapter 8 asks where the social and cultural importance of stench went after germ theory and finds a range of compelling and contradictory answers. While germ theory changed the reaction to odors, so people no longer believed they inhaled disease or health with the air they breathed, it neither rendered the sense of smell obsolete nor eliminated odor complaints. Instead, germ theory shattered the coherence that miasma theory had given to discussions of foul odors, fresh air, environment, and health, even as the details in many of those concerns remained the same. Some conversations about the air became more technical, as engineers measured smoke in parts per million and air-conditioning engineers defined fresh air through cubic feet per minute. Other conversations continued as before, with individuals holding their noses, complaining about smelly areas, and defining fresh air as country air. However, the continuing expansion of American cities, which included both industrial and middle-class residential suburbanization, increasingly separated the affluent from industries and laborers, amplifying the olfactory shock of their encounter. As zoning ordinances formalized the spatial and political separation of the classes, the perception of stenches shifted from a marker of environmental damage to a reflection of class and ethnic prejudice.
The irony of reform and regulation is that as health reformers achieved their goal and obtained power in urban governance, they increasingly eliminated the possibility of action against stench producers. Sanitarians had used the inaction of city politicians against industries to argue for the creation of health boards made up of physicians and scientists, who would respond to citizen complaints and eliminate health threats. Early reform efforts incorporated the testimony of aggrieved citizens, but as health officials established themselves within urban governance, and germ theory disrupted the equation of ill smells with ill health, health boards became less responsive to citizen complaints. This occurred not only because health officials’ definitions of offensive odors differed from laymen’s odor tolerance but also because health officials created a framework for responding to odor complaints that required corroborating the stench. Odors were, then as now, ephemeral and fleeting; they often vanished before an official could arrive to substantiate the complaint. Thus the regulatory framework of public health was, from its outset, a mismatch for the material reality of bad smells. Odors came and went more quickly than newly created health officials.
By seeking immediate relief from foul odors, individuals, health reformers, and urban governments willfully ignored the complex interactions between industry, population, and environment that produced the smells of their cities and the ill health of their populace. Although public health reform had its origins in stench concerns and the demand for fresh air, public health officials ultimately delegitimized the olfactory complaints that differentiated fresh air from foul. While many Americans still navigate the world by nose, as well as by sight, by sound, and by touch, the bureaucratization of public health and the turn from miasma to microbes have all but eliminated discussions of stench from our political discourse. When it is obvious that Americans still worry about the air they breathe, from the market for air fresheners to the struggles of minority communities against high asthma rates, we have to ask when and why legal action departed from everyday experience. The institutionalization of a particular kind of public health in the nineteenth century has taught people to ignore or downplay the environmental knowledge gleaned through their senses, even when their senses speak loudly.